For most nations, a visit from China’s head of state is not a casual affair. It is a signal. A symbol. A strategic calculation. Between 1998 and 2020, China’s top leaders—presidents and premiers alike—boarded state planes over 400 times, carrying with them more than protocol. They carried intention. Charting those visits, as researchers Yu Wang and Randall W. Stone have done in a newly assembled dataset, is like reading the pulse of Beijing’s foreign policy. The first pattern is sheer volume: leader visits have increased steadily over the decades.

From Jiang Zemin’s cautious steps to Xi Jinping’s globe-spanning ambitions, diplomacy became more frequent, more orchestrated, and—before COVID—near constant. But whom does China choose to visit? The second chart offers clues.

Russia sits comfortably at the top, but is joined by a telling mix: Germany, the UK, Belgium, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. Regression models behind the scenes confirm the logic: countries with higher GDP, stronger trade ties, and geopolitical relevance draw more attention. China’s diplomacy is pragmatic—less about ideology than about leverage. And then, there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

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And then, there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. A regional forum often overlooked in the West, the SCO becomes, in this data, a stage for symbolic engagement. In most years, China visited the summit’s host country. But not all. Russia, though central to the organization, is pointedly skipped at times. Presence, it turns out, is strategic. Absence speaks, too. Each visit is costly—in time, in optics, in diplomatic capital. That, perhaps, is the point. In an era where soft power often slips beneath the radar, this dataset makes one thing visible: China speaks through movement. The itinerary is the message.